he point of giving in my
resignation, when I found some petty burgesses, lawyers, advocates
without any information about public affairs, quoting the _Contrat
social,_ declaiming vehemently against tyranny, abuses, and proposing a
constitution apiece. I pictured to myself all the disastrous
consequences which might be produced upon a larger stage by such
outrageousness, and I arrived at Paris very dissatisfied with myself,
with my fellow-citizens, and with the ministers who were hurrying us into
this abyss."

The king had received all the memorials; on some few points the three
orders had commingled their wishes in one single memorial. M. Malouet
had failed to get this done in Auvergne. "The clergy insist upon putting
theology into their memorials," he wrote to M. de Montmorin, on the 24th
of March, 1789, "and the noblesse compensations for pecuniary sacrifice.
I have exhausted my lungs and have no hope that we shall succeed
completely on all points, but the differences of opinion between the
noblesse and the third estate are not embarrassing. There is rather more
pigheadedness amongst the clergy as to their debt, which they decline to
pay, and as to some points of discipline which, after all, are matters of
indifference to us; we shall have, all told, three memorials of which the
essential articles are pretty similar to those of the third estate. We
shall end as we began, peaceably."

"The memorials of 1789," says M. de Tocqueville [_L'ancien regime et la
Revolution,_ p. 211], "will remain as it were the will and testament of
the old French social system, the last expression of its desires, the
authentic manifesto of its latest wishes. In its totality and on many
points it likewise contained in the germ the principles of new France. I
read attentively the memorials drawn up by the three orders before
meeting in 1789,--I say the three orders, those of the noblesse and
clergy as well as those of the third estate,--and when I come to put
together all these several wishes, I perceive with a sort of terror that
what is demanded is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the
laws and all the usages having currency in the country, and I see at a
glance that there is about to be enacted one of the most vast and most
dangerous revolutions ever seen in the world. Those who will to-morrow
be its victims have no idea of it, they believe that the total and sudden
transformation of so complicated and so old a socia